Oscar Wilde
Page 29
Under the influence of this experience, he confided in Woodberry more than in most of the people he met. They spoke of Ruskin, and Wilde said, ‘Like Christ he bears the sins of the world,’ but then contrasted himself as ‘always, like Pilate, washing his hands of all responsibility.’ In reply to Woodberry’s obvious desire that he should not dissociate himself so sharply from moral considerations, Wilde said, ‘I was never touched by anything not tangible and visible but once, and that was just before writing “Ave Imperatrix.” ’ He insisted that ‘Poetry should be neither intellectual nor emotional’ (that is, neither didactic nor autobiographical). When Woodberry pointed out that Wilde’s own poems did not carry out his principles, ‘Well,’ said Wilde, ‘those poems are not the best.’
Yet, disapprove as he might, Woodberry was won: ‘I have seen no man whose charm stole on me so secretly, so rapidly, and with such entire sweetness. His poems are better than his theories, and he better than his poems.’ ‘He is the first artistic man I have ever seen—the first man in whom the artistic sense is mastering. He is of the type of Richard II in Shakespeare in his feeling for dramatic situations disjoined from ends or facts, purposes or feelings I mean—in life.’ Wilde lectured at the Presbyterian Road Church in Lincoln, and Woodberry said, ‘The nearest I have come to going to church for a long while was in attending your lecture.’ (He was in fact losing his job because of religious doubts.) Wilde replied, ‘Oh, Mr Woodberry, that is the most bitter thing that has been said to me,’ and Woodberry wrote to Norton, ‘But was it not irony that he, apostle of the beautiful, should be associated in my mind forever with my first view of crime and of misery in music, and with the Presbyterian church?’55
Still, Wilde had much to sustain him. In Louisville he happened to quote Keats’s ‘Sonnet on Blue’ in his lecture, and unwittingly delighted a woman in the audience who proved to be Keats’s niece, the daughter of his brother George. Mrs Emma (Keats) Speed invited Wilde to look at some of her uncle’s manuscripts she owned, and enjoyed his company so much that she later sent him the manuscript of this sonnet as a gift.56 At Julia Ward Howe’s in Newport in July, Wilde amazed the company by outtalking the two great Boston conversationalists, Thomas Appleton and Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was not displeased by a subsequent rumor in a gossip column, unfounded though it was, that he was going to marry Mrs Howe’s daughter Maud, so it was left for Mrs Howe to say that ‘if ever there were two people in the world who had no sympathy in common, they were the two.’ Wilde did allow that he had fallen in love five times in the course of his tour, and on each occasion would have been entangled if his business manager had not insisted that he proceed to the next stop. After seeing Miss Alsatia Allen of Montgomery, Alabama, he pronounced her ‘the most beautiful young lady in America,’ a judgment that the Saratoga Weekly Journal of July–August 1882 found worth repeating. But he told Sam Ward he had lost his heart in San Francisco.57
There were informal occasions, such as a tea in a San Francisco studio to which he was invited by some young artists. They had decorated the room with great care, even to painting roses and rose leaves on the skylight, and to stationing near the door the effigy of a woman in hat and veil whom they called Miss Piffle. A Chinese friend came over especially to prepare and serve the tea. Wilde entered, glanced at the guests, the bowing Chinese, the roses on the skylight, and said, ‘This is where I belong. This is my atmosphere. I didn’t know such a place existed in the whole United States.’ He praised the tea and the teacups, and in strolling around to admire other features of the studio almost fell against Miss Piffle. As he stepped back with an apology, something gave away the identity of the mannequin. Having concocted himself, Wilde had a fellow feeling for her. Without changing his tone, he began to talk with her about San Francisco. He replied to her imaginary remarks with such wit and gaiety that she seemed actually to be contributing.58
Wilde surveyed his American adventures with a mixture of vanity, wonder, and irony. In his running commentary to friends at home, he described some of the striking moments: the audience in Salt Lake City, where each Mormon husband sat surrounded by a coven of wives, for example, or the splendid renaissance of art he detected in the town he was then at, which happened to be Griggsville, Illinois. He would later improve upon this. One of his best adventures, also to be much embroidered, took place at Leadville, high up in the Rocky Mountains. Wilde had prepared himself by wearing, under his usual green overcoat, a pair of baggy trousers, and he wore a miner’s black slouch hat. During the ten-thousand-foot climb he left his railway car to join the engineer in the cab, and when he proved to be an Irishman, they had a particularly pleasant talk. But as Wilde arrived he felt faint, and a physician was summoned. His ailment was diagnosed as merely ‘light air,’ and his reception then went forward. The mayor, H. A. W. Tabor, known as the Silver King, invited him to visit the Matchless Mine. Wilde was let down in a bucket; once at the bottom, he found two ceremonies had been laid on. One was that he should open a new shaft, named ‘The Oscar’ in his honor, with a silver drill. ‘I had hoped that in their grand simple way they would have offered me shares in “The Oscar,” ’ he commented later, ‘but in their artless untutored fashion they did not.’ Then there was supper at the bottom of the mine. ‘The amazement of the miners when they saw that art and appetite could go hand in hand knew no bounds,’ he reported. They cheered when he lit a cigar; when he downed a drink without a grimace they called him ‘a bully boy with no glass eye.’ As for the dinner, ‘The first course was whiskey, the second whiskey, the third whiskey, all the courses were whiskey, but still they called it supper,’ a delusion he did not attempt to disturb. ‘In the evening I went to the Casino,’ Wilde would reminisce. ‘There I found the miners and the female friends of the miners, and in one corner a pianist—sitting at a piano over which was this notice: “Please don’t shoot the pianist; he is doing his best.” I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music, my apostolic task would be much simplified, as indeed it was.’59 In The Duchess of Padua the Duke comments with nuanced cruelty about the shouting demonstrators,
I fear
They have become a little out of tune,
So I must tell my men to fire on them.
I cannot bear bad music!
Asked later whether the miners had not been rough and ready, Wilde defended them, as later he would often defend ordinary people: ‘Ready, but not rough. They were polished and refined compared with the people I met in larger cities farther East.… There is no chance for roughness. The revolver is their book of etiquette. This teaches lessons that are not forgotten’ At his lecture the audience had amused the lecturer more than he had amused them: ‘I spoke to them of the early Florentines, and they slept as though no crime had ever stained the ravines of their mountain home.’ ‘Unluckily,’ he described one of Whistler’s nocturnes in blue and gold. ‘Then they leaped to their feet and in their grand simple style swore that such things should not be. Some of the younger ones pulled their revolvers out and left hurriedly to see if Jimmy was “prowling about the saloons.” ’ He saw a performance of Macbeth in which Lady Macbeth was played by a convicted poisoner. (It was like Sibyl Vane, in love, playing Juliet in Dorian Gray.) Because the miners mined for silver, Wilde read them passages from the autobiography of that eminent silversmith Benvenuto Cellini. ‘I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the inquiry, “Who shot him?” ’ Wilde described his visit to Leadville so amusingly that his achievement in bringing art to that city may go unnoticed. There was no challenge that he failed to take up. He boasted smilingly to Whistler, ‘I have already civilised America—il reste seulement le ciel!’60
Caricature of Wilde as a pig, by Whistler. (University of Glasgow, Birnie Philip Bequest)
James McNeill W
histler. (Library of Congress)
Wilde photographed in New York, by Napoleon Sarony, January 1882. (Library of Congress)
Wilde, painted during the months in 1883 when he sported a coiffure of Neronian curls.
Flyer for Wilde’s lecture on America, 1833.
The Young Sophocles Leading the Chorus After the Battle of Salamis, by John Donoghue. (Art Institute of Chicago)
Constance and Cyril Wilde, November 1889. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
John Gray. (Courtesy of the Reverend Brocard Sewell, O. P., and of the Reverend Bede Bailey, St. Dominic’s Priory)
Reginald Turner. (Courtesy of The Hyde Collection)
Robert Ross. (Courtesy of The Hyde Collection)
Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt, 1887. (Library of Congress)
Etching of Wilde and a child, possibly the artist’s son, by James Edward Kelly, 1882. (Author’s collection)
On the Isle of Wight, summer 1885.
The whole tour was an achievement of courage and grace, along with ineptitude and self-advertisement. Wilde succeeded in naturalizing the word ‘aesthetic,’ even if Americans dropped the initial a. However effeminate his doctrines were thought to be, they constituted the most determined and sustained attack upon materialistic vulgarity that America had seen. That the attack was itself a bit vulgar did not diminish its effect. And Wilde presented a theory not only of art but of being, not only a distinguished personality but an antithesis to getting on without regard for the quality of life. The newspapers may have been unfair, but they paid him his due in attention. From now on the conception of artist was to take on heroic properties; to victimize him might cost one dear.
But Wilde was not yet ready to go home.
The Dream Theatre
The spectator is to be receptive. He is the violin on which the master is to play.
To the surprise of his family and friends, Wilde stayed on in America for two and a half months after he stopped lecturing in mid-October. He moved from the Fifth Avenue Hotel to the Brunswick, then to the Windsor, finally going downtown to 61 Irving Place, at the corner of 17th Street, and then to 48 West 11th Street, in Greenwich Village.61 His mother, grateful for some money he had sent her, wrote to him, ‘I thought you had sailed away to Japan—what a long time you are in New York.’ She added, ‘You have fought your way splendidly.’62 The obvious reason for his delayed departure was an attack of malaria, which he described to Andrew’s American Queen on 23 December as ‘an aesthetic disease but a deuced nuisance.’ (In 1895 he still had quinine in his medicine cabinet, so malaria had probably recurred.) Two other things also detained him. One was the impending arrival of Lillie Langtry, who after a brief apprenticeship in London had organized her own company and was to tour America. Throughout his travels he had claimed her as a sympathizer with his movement who lived in a house surrounded by aesthetic objects, and had praised not only her beauty but her ‘wonderfully musical and well-modulated voice.’ ‘Even my own poor sonnets when recited by her make me quiver with delight. I shall write them to her until she is ninety,’ he commented to the same journal on 18 November 1882. In Moncton he was asked by an interviewer if he had discovered her, and neatly evaded the question by saying, ‘I would rather have discovered Mrs Langtry than have discovered America,’ a remark which went the journalistic rounds.63
She was due to arrive on the S.S. Arizona on 23 October. Wilde rose just in time to catch the launch which left the pier at 4:30 a.m. The New York Times for the following day commented on his appearance:
He was dressed as probably no grown man in the world was ever dressed before. His hat was of brown cloth not less than six inches high; his coat was of black velvet; his overcoat was of green cloth, heavily trimmed with fur; his trousers matched his hat; his tie was gaudy and his shirtfront very open, displaying a large expanse of manly chest. A pair of brown cloth gloves and several pimples on his chin completed his toilet. His flowing hair and the fur trimming of his coat were just of a shade, and they gave him the appearance of having his hair combed down one side of him to his heels and up the other side.
Wilde carried an armful of lilies, and presented them with appropriate fanfare.
Mrs Langtry had just under a week before opening as Hester Graze-brook in Tom Taylor’s An Unequal Match at the Park Theatre on Sunday, 29 October. During these days Wilde made himself useful to her. He took her to Sarony for histrionic photographs.e Hearing that she was also planning to play Rosalind in As You Like It, he persuaded her not to wear long-legged boots in the part, as Rose Coghlan had been doing. In reply, she disputed with him about how he should wear his curled locks.65 She took up with a wealthy American, Freddy Gebhardt, and once when Wilde was visiting her she suddenly flung a costly necklace at him, explaining, ‘When I saw Freddy just now, he took that out of his pocket and flung it at me across the table, saying, like the surly bear he is, “If you want that you can keep it.” So I felt I must positively fling it at somebody else.’ Wilde may not have been amused. Another bit of their conversation was reported. She asked him why he thought of going to Australia, and he replied, ‘Well, do you know, when I look at the map and see what an awfully ugly-looking country Australia is, I feel as if I want to go there to see if it cannot be changed into a more beautiful form.’66f
Early on the day of her opening, Mrs Langtry was escorted by David Belasco to see a new type of movable double stage which had just been invented by Steele Mackaye. Shortly afterwards she received the dreadful news that the Park Theatre was on fire. The performance was off, but fortunately Wallack’s Theatre was available a week later. Wilde attended the opening with Steele Mackaye on 6 November, and then, at the suggestion of his friend Hurlbert of the New York World, went to the composing room of that newspaper in his knee breeches and wrote there a review of the performance. Entitled simply ‘Mrs. Langtry,’ it began as a paean in praise of her beauty, which he said could be found only in ancient Greece, but insisted that her performance was an artistic fusion of ‘classical grace’ and ‘absolute reality.’ Wilde attributed the new movement in English art, that following the Pre-Raphaelites, to the inspiration of Mrs Langtry’s face. He liked her dresses immensely, the scenery hardly at all, but thought she made the latter unimportant.68 It was as much as he could say about a play that was obviously mediocre, but it attempted to link beauty and art very closely in her person, and she could not fail to be pleased. After some days she was off on tour, and became a subject of scandal in the press for diffusing beauty among American men in quite a different way from Wilde’s.
But Wilde had another interest. In his review of Lillie Langtry he had mentioned the new stage curtain at the Madison Square Theatre—this was a covert compliment to the man who had commissioned it, Steele Mackaye. Mackaye was perhaps the greatest theatrical innovator of his time, and had completely remodeled the old Fifth Avenue Theatre into the Madison Square Theatre. A safety curtain was one of his new ideas, another was folding seats, another was the movable double stage which Lillie Langtry had examined. Mackaye, like Wilde, was eager to bring about a renaissance, and specifically a theatrical one. Although forty years old, he looked almost as young as Wilde. He had studied with Delsarte, and the old master had designated him as his successor in teaching a new conjunction of gesture and word. In New York, Mackaye opened a Delsarte school and eventually the first American School of Acting. He gave Wilde lessons in the Delsartian system, using Hamlet.69 He wrote a great many plays, but seems to have recognized that his principal talent was for production and stage devices. The one thing he had no skill at all with was money. He was as lavish in entertainment as Wilde, and after having run the Madison Square Theatre from 1879 to 1881 had been forced to give it up because of financial difficulties.
Now Mackaye evolved an even grander scheme, a dream theatre. By 16 June he had a design for it, and determined that it should be situated at 33rd Street and Broadway, attached, like the Savoy Theatre in London, to a hotel. All that was necessary
was to secure $1 million. Among the potential backers was George W. Childs, Wilde’s rich friend from Philadelphia. Mackaye met with his sponsors several times during August and September, but he could not quite bring them to open their wallets.
Wilde was greatly concerned in these negotiations, because he and Mackaye had joined their hopes together. Mackaye planned to inaugurate the new theatre with Wilde’s The Duchess of Padua, and, after some changes which he felt were necessary, with Vera. These might well be followed by The Cardinal of Avignon, a Shelleyesque play of which Wilde had written the scenario. For the Duchess they hoped to secure Mary Anderson. Wilde culminated months of delicate coaxing by discussing the play with her in Long Branch. She remembered his telling her, The stage is the key that has opened the world of art to you.’ ‘I cannot write the scenario till I see you and talk to you. All good plays are a combination of the dream of a poet and that practical knowledge of the actor which gives concentration to action.… I want you to rank with the great actresses of the earth … and having in you a faith which is as flawless as it is fervent I doubt not for a moment that I can and will write for you a play which, created for you, and inspired by you, shall give you the glory of a Rachel, and may yield me the fame of a [Victor] Hugo.’ On 8 September, still breathing perfect confidence, he arranged to meet her and settle the scenario: ‘I think I have so conceived it that we shall simultaneously become immortal in one night!’70 All that was necessary was to settle the terms. Wilde wanted an advance of $5000 and a royalty on performances. But Miss Anderson’s stepfather and business manager, Hamilton Griffin, whom Wilde dubbed ‘the Griffin,’ was stem in her interests. Wilde expected to have her acceptance by mid-September, but on the 20th he was complaining to Mackaye, ‘No news from the Anderson—from the Griffin none. O art and Kentucky, how ill your alliance is! She is sweet and good (he is a padded horror), if I could see her I could arrange it all.’ But he was confident that the Kentucky-born actress would eventually consent. ‘Do not yet despair,’ he told Mackaye, ‘you and I together should conquer the world. Why not? Let us do it!’71